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Reviewing the SEO of small business websites. End-to-end (e2e) testing is a methodology used to test whether the flow of an application is performing as designed from start to finish. What’s actually happening on the hundreds of thousands of small business websites we hear about? This teardown looks at 150k of those sites, and the answer is it’s a bit of a wild west: ~2% of small business websites are marked noindex, which means search engines will not index the site! This rises to 4.4% of websites on Squarespace have the setting, and 2.1% for WordPress.com. 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag, which tells search engines what the most important content on the page is. Shout out to Wix this time, with 40% of their sites missing it. WordPress.com still does fairly badly with 24% of sites missing the tag. Yelp and other directory sites dominate search for small business terms (such as “best plumber [town]”. Yelp appears in the top five search … [Read more...] about 150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019 • WPShout

On the surface, hackathons give people the opportunity to create original projects, and, if you get lucky, some of them might even alleviate pain points and bring value to the business. But, when you take a closer look at what hackathons entail—teamwork, creativity, innovation, and optimism—the additional benefits they bring far exceed the final product. That is why, twice a year, WP Engine gives engineers and developers a chance to participate in 48-hours of creative chaos to showcase their problem-solving and collaboration skills. Wanting to ensure that interns fully experience what it’s like to be a WP Engine employee, interns also get a hackathon of their own. In the past, the intern hackathon was limited to only software engineers. But, in the spirit of encouraging interdisciplinary teamwork, interns from all departments joined in on the fun this summer. Like the hackathon for full-time employees, interns are given 48-hours to find a pain point, … [Read more...] about 48 Hours Later: Intern Hackathon 2019

AUSTIN, Texas – May X, 2018 – WP Engine, the WordPress Digital Experience Platform (DXP), today announced the launch of the Cloudflare Stream Video Plugin for WordPress. The plugin was built by WP Engine in partnership with Cloudflare to make it incredibly easy for WordPress users to publish and stream performance optimized videos on WordPress sites. Cloudflare Stream is an easy-to-use, affordable, on-demand video streaming platform that runs on Cloudflare’s secure global network. The end-to-end solution includes storage, encoding and a customizable video.js player. Video pain points: overpriced and not scalable Many of the video service options currently on the market are costly or require specific video domain expertise. Self-hosting native videos can often hinder page load times, and degrade the user experience. Digital developers and agencies have found that integrating video in the WordPress editor sometimes feels disjointed, forcing them to switch between … [Read more...] about WP Engine Launches Cloudflare Stream Video Plugin For WordPress

WordPress made easy, as a service – a fascinating product. This is interesting from a product point of view: this “All in One WordPress Website Builder” came to my attention last week but seems to have been around for at least. It’s essentially “easy-to-use hosted WordPress as a service” (ETUHWAAS for short, which I’m sure will catch on). You get Google Cloud powered hosting with Elementor and a bunch of plugins for anything between $10 and $100/month. This has a nice dashboard which has a WordPress installer, which presumably bundles a bunch of plugins. It’s not clear if you get the standard WordPress Dashboard or a simplified version, but everything else is “builder-ified”. This is very much aimed at the mass market and “x million small businesses without a website” we hear about, and it’s interesting that its main selling point can be “WordPress is hard to use”, and that – as … [Read more...] about Build and Host WordPress Websites in Minutes • WPShout

When it comes to building professional, highly functional contact and lead forms for WordPress sites, there are few solutions which deliver the ease-of-use of WPForms. With over 2 million websites using WPForms, this popular WordPress plugin makes it easy for site owners to create great-looking, easily embedded forms in minutes, without writing any code and while still providing the extensibility and customization that developers love. Now, fans of WP Engine’s Genesis-powered StudioPress Themes can automatically install and activate WPForms using the one-click theme setup feature in our latest themes including Revolution Pro‚ Monochrome Pro, and the Genesis Sample theme (which is used as a launch point to create countless custom experiences). When used on the WP Engine digital experience platform the combination of these products provides a powerful way for brands, agencies and small businesses to bring revenue generating experiences to market faster than ever. See the … [Read more...] about WP Engine Partners with WPForms to Bring Easy Lead Capture to StudioPress Themes